JAG CENTRAL

Army Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Relieved of Command (DoD)

From the NY Times, the BIG story of the day: 4-Star General Is Dismissed:

The Army has abruptly relieved the four-star general in charge of training and recruiting after an investigation into unspecified "personal misconduct," Army officials said Tuesday.

The officer, Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, was dismissed on Monday by the Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, just a few months before General Byrnes was scheduled to retire as head of the Army Training and Doctrine Command.

In that position, which he assumed in November 2002, General Byrnes oversaw Army training programs and the development of the service's war-fighting guidelines. The command, which is based in Fort Monroe, Va., runs 33 training schools and centers on 16 Army installations, and will train 447,000 soldiers this year.

Asked at a Pentagon news conference on Tuesday about the rare disciplinary action taken against such a senior officer, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said: "It's something that's being handled in the proper channels. And it's not something that it would be appropriate for me to get involved with."

Army officials said the Defense Department inspector general handles personal misconduct cases, as opposed to the Criminal Investigation Command, which deals with criminal complaints.

A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, told reporters that the investigation involved "matters of personal conduct," but he declined to elaborate. General Byrnes, 55, is married with two adult children.

Senior Army officials are now reviewing the inquiry to determine General Byrnes's retirement rank and benefits, but the officials said it was unlikely any further disciplinary action would be taken.

Reuters elaborated on the reason for the dismissal--the good ol' standby, sexual misconduct:

An Army official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the disciplinary action followed an investigation by the Defense Department inspector general's office into "allegations of personal misconduct of a sexual nature."

The official offered no further details of the allegations against Byrnes, who is married.
....
Boyce said the investigation into Byrnes had been going on for "a couple of months" but could not say whether it began before Wallace was nominated to replace him. Boyce said he knew of no one else who was investigated for possible misconduct along with Byrnes, adding that any potential further action against Byrnes would be taken by Army officials.

ANALYSIS: Pentagon spokesmen today said they couldn't remember the last time an Army four-star general was relieved. Well, I had a few thoughts off the top of my head: MacArthur, McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, Halleck, among others. But upon further inspection, these don't qualify: MacArthur was a 5-star when Truman fired him, and the rest were 2-star when Lincoln fired them. I can't find any evidence of a 4-star being relieved of command formally. Some might argue that Patton's transfer from Third Army to Twelfth Army (a paper army charged with writing the history of WWII) by Eisenhower was tantamount to a relief of command, but there was no formal announcement like the one today.

What is the law governing relief of command in the Army?

AR 600-20, Army Command Policy, governs how the Army giveth and taketh away commands. Para. 2-17 governs relief for cause. It states that any senior commander may relieve a commander for cause; to be final, it must be approved by the first general officer in the chain of command. For Gen. Byrnes, that would be Gen. Schoomaker, Chief of Staff of the Army.

In other news, Bosnian Serb War Fugitive Arrested in Argentina ("After more than five years on the run, Milan Lukic, a Bosnian Serb militia leader wanted by the United Nations war crimes tribunal, was arrested in Buenos Aires. Mr. Lukic, at left in 1992, was indicted by the tribunal in The Hague in 2000 in connection with the abduction and killing of 20 Muslims in 1993, during the Bosnian war. Last year, he was sentenced in absentia to 20 years in prison by a Serbian court for the abduction, torture and killing of Muslim civilians. His arrest comes three months after another Serb war crimes fugitive, Nebosja Minic, was arrested in Mendoza.")

From the Washington Post, 4-Star General Relieved of Command. Always count on the WaPo to bring the juicy details:

Several defense sources familiar with the case, speaking anonymously because the investigation is not complete, said Byrnes is accused of having an "inappropriate relationship," and some described him as being involved in an extramarital affair.

Byrnes, reached by telephone at his home yesterday, declined to comment. His defense attorney, Lt. Col. David H. Robertson, said the allegation against Byrnes involves an affair with a private citizen. Byrnes has been separated from his wife since May 2004; their divorce was finalized on Monday, coincidentally the same day he was relieved of command, Robertson said.

"The allegation against him does not involve a relationship with anyone within the military or even the federal government," Robertson said, emphasizing that the allegations do not involve more than one relationship. "It does not involve anyone on active duty or a civilian in the Department of Defense."

Having an extramarital affair can be deemed adultery and a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. But such cases rarely go to court-martial and usually end in administrative punishment such as a letter of reprimand, according to military lawyers. Relieving a general of his command amid such allegations is extremely unusual, especially given that he was about to retire.

Should American troops be required to build criminal cases against Iraqi insurgents in order to ensure they stay in jail? That's the focus of today's main story about MilJust in USA Today entitled When Shooting Stops, Troops Turn Detective:

In a little-noticed decision made within months of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the United States authorized creation of an Iraqi criminal court that would treat insurgents not as enemy combatants but as criminals.

At the time, the insurgency was in its infancy. Coalition Provisional Authority administrator Paul Bremer described the rebels as "a small minority of bitter-enders." Two years later, U.S. and Iraqi government forces are grappling with a violent and somewhat coordinated resistance that has claimed the lives of more than 1,800 servicemembers and thousands of Iraqi security troops.

The decision to treat insurgents as criminals has forced soldiers to act as cops and has authorities scrambling to build cases against thousands of detainees in U.S.-run prisons. Some soldiers say running rebels through the courts places American forces at a disadvantage, burdening soldiers in a guerrilla war with peacetime rules.

What's the role of judge advocates in all this? A main one is training soldiers how to gather evidence:

Soldiers with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, responsible for the area in and around Baghdad, are drilled from the moment they arrive on the importance of gathering evidence, getting sworn statements from witnesses and taking good pictures that may later be used in court, says Col. William Hudson, the division's staff judge advocate.

Nearly every Humvee in the division is stocked with an "evidence kit," which includes blank sworn-statement forms, a digital camera, plastic gloves and a spray that detects gunpowder residue, he says.

"The paperwork (needed) for convicting these guys is substantial," says Capt. Bart Nagle, 35, of Richmond, Va., the intelligence chief for the Marine battalion in Ramadi. "The tendency is going to be, increasingly: 'How do you know it is him?' You have to become a police officer."

The files they assemble can include details on informants, diagrams, a summary written by each Marine involved in the case, a chain-of-custody report tracing the handling of evidence and photographs from the scene of an attack or capture.

In other news, Four-Star General Dismissed From Command.

Categories: Byrnes, Adultery, Newspapers, Iraq, Bosnia